Scott: Jobs, not Medicaid growth

Florida Gov. Rick Scott justified his decision to opt out of the Medicaid expansion Thursday, saying that the massive health care program was growing at a pace that outstrips general revenue and that he was focused on helping his state get jobs.

“The most important thing is working on getting everybody a job,” he said on CBS’s “This Morning” when asked about health care. “We have 800,000 people out of work, but we’ve had a drop in unemployment, that’s the most important thing we can do.”

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“That’s what I’m focused on, getting our citizens jobs to afford insurance. This expansion will cost the federal government, which is our tax money, and the state a lot of money. We can’t afford it,” he explained.

The Republican governor compared the expansion to the stimulus, saying, “they put money into the education system and then took it away and our schools relied on it. I don’t want to do the same thing to our citizens.”

Scott said that Medicaid costs were increasing at an unsustainable rate, and said that Medicaid expansion — which he called “significant” — was undercutting education funding.

“Medicaid is growing at 3.5 times our general revenue. So it’s making it difficult to fund our K through 12 education,” he said. “If you talk to the citizens, they want a job, they want to make sure their kids can get a great education. Every time we expand Medicaid, we make it more difficult to fund our education system, which is very important to our citizens.”

The Florida governor said that his focus, when it came to health care, was to “make sure you allow people to buy the insurance they want to buy” and to “look at how you can, through competition, drive down the cost,” rather than to rely on a federal program.